darph.plock

An interesting find by Lukas Mathis is the Bubble Cursor, a proof-of-concept Script that always makes the nearest link an active link, eliminating the need to hit an object precisely with your curser.

It is an interesting concept, but I believe it has major drawbacks. One is attention. Not only do I have to pay attention to where my cursor is located. I now have to find the active link in the vicinity of my cursor – I have to rely on the site to tell me in no unclear term, what will happen if I click on that white, dead space. Navigation becomes an obscure process relying solely on the “flashiness” of the hover to tell me what I am doing.

I am also not sure if it is a good idea to have the whole website being a “hot zone”. While reading a text I often click – not always entirely focussed – on different parts, marking text while reading it, etc. If all of the site is hot, every single click will lead to an action, which dramatically increases the chance of performing some action that I didn’t intend to.

In Google’s web based mail client the “save draft” and “send” buttons are already dangerously close to each other. With the bubble cursor the effective size of the buttons is increased to the point where they are merely one pixel apart. Expanding this to every single link in the site exponentially increases the chance to click the wrong button. Not to mention that you cannot assume that all graphical operating systems will not execute the event when you click on an inactive window to bring it to the foreground. I know OS X requires two clicks, but I wouldn’t be so sure in other OSs.

Seeing how often I click next to what I actually intended to click on, only to then refine my targeting (*waving fist at Fitt*), I can see where it might be a good idea to have a limited “hot zone” around certain buttons for those with bad aiming skills. Let’s call it “glowing”. I don’t think, however, that expanding the buttons and links to cover the full page at all times does increase usability.  Dead space is important.